The Road to Morganton: Groundbreaking for a new campus
The seventh installment in our documentary series features the groundbreaking event on June 21. Chancellor Todd Roberts said it best: "It takes a village — and we have one heck of a village."
On Jan. 10, Dr. Francis S. Collins, famous geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, visited NCSSM to meet students, deliver a talk, and visit classrooms.
NCSSM co-hosted the 15th annual State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium (SNCURCS) with Duke University, the first time a high school has co-hosted the event. Nearly 60 NCSSM students -- from the residential, online, and Summer Ventures programs -- presented their research, from explorations of machine learning to the decision-making process in baseball.
“The new frontier is computational,” says chemistry instructor Bob Gotwals. “We want our kids prepared for that, we want them ready for that.”
As Gotwals and his colleagues are aware, NCSSM is the only high school in the country that offers a credit-bearing suite of courses in computational science. Interested students can choose from 11 courses that range from an introduction to the science to computational investigations of physics, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and medicinal chemistry.
NCSSM has been named a "public elite" high school by the Challenge Index formerly compiled by the Washington Post, one of only 27 schools in the United States to make the list.
Chibby Uwakwe '19 took the NCSSM-Online program while enrolled at Fike High School. He received acceptance letters to all 12 colleges to which he applied, including UNC System schools, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn and Columbia.
Higher Education Works highlighted NCSSM in a feature story and video, titled "NCSSM: 'Best high-school education in the country.'" The feature appears as part of their series "What makes a great university." NCSSM is the only high school to be featured in the series.
Seven NCSSM seniors in the school’s residential program and one NCSSM Online senior from Enloe High School are among 300 students nationwide and beyond who have been named by Society for Science & the Public as Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholars. Congratulations, students!
“Hello North Carolina,” Koch told hundreds who packed the auditorium at NCSSM and a grand ballroom at NC State. “The International Space Station has you loud and clear. Welcome aboard.”
For the next 20 minutes, Koch, a NASA flight engineer, fielded prepared questions from students from both institutions in an event broadcast live on NASA TV.
Three times -- as a freshman, sophomore, and junior -- he’s claimed first place in state competition. Twice he’s finished in third place nationally. But eclipsing all those awards was Forrest’s ultimate achievement: the title of national champion.
Kallie Dalton and Juan Marin started talking during NCSSM Online orientation in 2012. Then they ended up in the same class. She being from western NC and he from Apex, it was the beginning of what would become a long-distance "nerd romance." Seven years later, the couple are engaged to be married.
Akwe:kon, the American Indian cultural club at NCSSM, along with the Office of Admissions, will host the school's annual American Indian Powwow on Saturday, February 1, 2020. American Indians from North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina will travel to Durham for a day of music, dance, arts, crafts, and food on NCSSM’s campus.
Last summer, 176 rising seniors participated in NCSSM’s Summer Research & Innovation Program (SRIP). And though their learning spaces ranged widely -- from NCSSM classrooms to art museums, historic plantations, university science labs, and local tech startups -- they all shared some freedoms that might be in short supply for today's high-achieving high school students:
Freedom to question and think critically
Permission -- and encouragement -- to try, fail and start over
After all, discovery, says engineering instructor Letitia Hubbard, is often "found right around the corner from disappointment and failure."
Carolinas HealthCare System Blue Ridge's record-breaking gift conveys naming rights for a comprehensive student wellness and activities center at NCSSM-Morganton, on which the school broke ground in June.
